


Tighter, Harder

by loverofthelight24



Series: I Promise, I'll Do Better [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate 5x15, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Stiles, Drabble, F/M, Stiles loves Lydia so damn much, Stiles-centric, eichen house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6209482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loverofthelight24/pseuds/loverofthelight24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was supposed to be simple.</p><p>Stiles had constructed this seemingly imperfect master plan to get Lydia out of Eichen House in his head. There were four simple steps, four things he and the pack needed to do to ensure her safety:</p><p>Get to Eichen. Get to the closed unit. Get Lydia. Get out.</p><p>He should’ve known the simplicity of his plan would end up being its biggest flaw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tighter, Harder

It was supposed to be simple.

Stiles had constructed this seemingly imperfect master plan to get Lydia out of Eichen House in his head. There were four simple steps, four things he and the pack needed to do to ensure her safety:

Get to Eichen. Get to the closed unit. Get Lydia. Get out.

He should’ve known the simplicity of his plan would end up being its biggest flaw. Granted, he didn’t have sufficient time or skill to invent a complex and fireproof method to break Lydia out of the manmade hell of Eichen House. If they waited any increment of time longer, even waited a minute more, Lydia’s chances of survival would be dismal at best. But he still should’ve known.

He should’ve known that falling back on something as intangible and easy as simplicity had become unheard of in this cruel, supernatural world of Beacon Hills that had begun to almost suffocate him and his friends.

His” perfect” masterplan didn’t include Kira needing an extra ten minutes to fry the asylum’s electric circuits to cause a brownout. It didn’t plan for there to be some unnamed patient/experiment attempting to strike up a friendly (and untimely) conversation with them as they rounded the corner of the closed unit and therefore attracting the attention of the guards. It certainly didn’t include the key card he swiped from an orderly to become inactive, or needing Scott to essentially beat up Liam to have the door collapse from both the alpha and beta’s livid hands.

Silently thanking the werewolves, Stiles shuffled his feet and sprinted to the closed unit; to Lydia. He may have slammed every corner of the hall with his bad shoulder, and he may have been panting too hard from both trembling anxiety and physical exertion, but he eventually found where she was.

He stopped panting immediately when he found himself in the doorway of Lydia’s room.

The first thing he saw was the leather straps bounding her feet, although her evident malnourishment caused her pale ankles to dangle loosely in and out of the straps. Jagged scars, swollen and crusted with dried blood, strangled the width of her ankles from when the leather had once bound them tightly.

He didn’t have much time to direct his fury towards this, however, when he glanced upwards and saw the back of someone’s body, clad in standard gray scrubs, squatting by Lydia’s bedside. A screeching sound of machinery filled the otherwise silent room, as Stiles discovered the man lowering a shiny, noisy metal instrument closer to the side of her unnaturally still head.

A drill.

The sight enough was enough to send Stiles barreling into the room and knocking the orderly and the drill towards the opposite wall with the force of his body alone. He didn’t have enough time to wonder how his lanky build knocked the relatively built orderly off of their feet, because his mind only possessed the thoughts of murder.

Pure, simple, passion-driven murder.

Latching his trembling hands on the man’s neck, Stiles dragged the orderly by his neck up the colorless wall and squeezed it with every cell of strength he had left. At the first sight of the man’s gasping face, he immediately recognized the orderly to be the one that gave Lydia a strange, pervasive look and Stiles a small inkling of the rage he felt right now at their first visit as a pack to Eichen House a month before. From this, he only held on tighter. Harder.

Stiles had never felt this much rage swell within him since his mother had died when he was a child. For months after her death, he had gone to school every day and did not speak one word as contrary to his spastic, awkward nature even as an 8-year-old kid. He ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwich his father tried to replicate from his mother’s recipe every day at lunch in silence. He made sandcastles in the sandbox every recess in silence, as it reminded him of when he and his mom would create monstrosities of sand architecture every summer at Lake Tahoe. Initially, he only opened his mouth when he would scream at his classmates who tried to join him. Eventually, they stopped asking to help. And Stiles became silent again.

Only this time, as a 17-year-old, Stiles was not silent in his rage. He was burning in it, seething and panting as his grip on the orderly’s neck remained ever so still as a sickly purple tint creeped into the man’s face. The thought of this man drilling a hole into Lydia’s head; _his Lydia’s_ head, was enough to keep him deafening in his anger.

“I should’ve done this the second I saw you looking at her a month ago,” Stiles whispered gruffly, his voice crumbling into a mess of labored breathing and snapped bones at every syllable.

The orderly let out a pleading sound of resistance as Stiles’ brought his hands closer together around his neck, making his grip tighter, harder.

By this time, Stiles had lost control of whatever monologue he was about to deliver, because all he could focus on what would’ve happened if he had arrived in this room a second later.

_Lydia with a bloody hole plaguing the vivid auburn of her hair. Her breath shortening and slowing. Her beautiful jade eyes glassing over with lifelessness. Stiles standing there, watching it all helplessly. Stiles going out of his mind._

“You were going to drill a fucking hole in her head,” he spoke with a half-sob drowning his voice, his vision clouding with inevitable tears. “You were going to fucking kill _her_.”

As his thumbs pressed deeper into the man’s trachea, Stiles almost felt the scarily sweet satisfaction of knowing his hands caused someone else’s to permanently stop moving until a sound other than the orderly’s increasingly shallow breaths and his heavy ones filled the room.

“Stiles?”

Whipping around to find the source of the voice, Stiles found it to be green eyes and strawberry-blonde hair.

Only then did his hands fall away from the man’s neck.

As fast as he charged through the room, he found himself falling at her bedside before running his twitching hands over every part of her pallid skin he could find. Gently, he ran his thumbs over the gaunt apples of her cheeks, under her sunken panicked eyes, the corner of her chapped lips, and down the side of her neck where he found random patches of red skin scattering it. Burns.

Screwing both his eyes and mouth shut, he tried to not give in finishing the job on the orderly fainted on the floor behind him and tried to regain focus on the girl in front of him. His hands shook and thrummed erratically on the skin of her neck, as he tried to choke down the bile that was anxiously crawling its way up his throat. Lydia was here, so weak and close to death beside him, because of him. He didn’t know exactly why, but he was supposed to be the one in the pack to protect her always and at all costs. That was the mental deal he made with himself after Allison’s death, a _murder_ , which he caused. Directly or not, he will always know was the one who ultimately killed her.

A girl who loved his best friend endlessly and died in his arms telling him so before she could listen to him tell her those exact same words. A girl who Lydia screamed for as she clutched his chest, sobbing into his unconscious body as the words “my fault” fell out of her mouth and onto the blood stains of his shirt.

It was already shitty enough to live in a world where he killed Allison. Not only did he not want to, but he couldn’t possibly survive in a world where Lydia Martin didn’t exist, especially in one where she didn’t exist not only because of his shortcomings as her best friend, but as a person who was infallibly and irrevocably in love with her and never had the damn stamina to accurately tell her.

With pupils blown and brown eyes shooting wide open, he felt the small weight of a dry hand grab onto his shaking one beside her neck. Her eyes fluttered as she ran her the pad of her thumb over his white knuckles, soothing them until his grip loosened and his tremor ceased into almost stillness. As he raked his eyes over every inch of her face, he wondered what the reason was that Lydia’s presence and touch alone could effectively bring him out of his own personal abyss of darkness that he had grown too fond of over his lifespan.

He found it as she said his name again.

“Stiles, you’re supposed to be the one comforting me.”

He had to force the sob in his throat from loudly emitting out of his mouth, because that sentence was just _so_ Lydia and this world is so damn cruel for making her sound so alive when she looked anything but. Allowing himself a minute to bring her light body close to his own, Stiles held her like porcelain, except now he knew firsthand that Lydia Martin was so much stronger than Valack, any orderly, or any member of the pack could suspect.

At that, he let a smile ghost over his face as he brought his face into the crook of her neck, not being able to resist kissing every inch of the hand that held his own. At this, she ran her free hand to the nape of Stiles’ neck and tugged the longer strands of his hair between her fingers, finding herself _finally_ being able breathe as soon as she inhaled the very present and very real scent of pine needles and firewood. A scent that was so Stiles she could scream, only for the first time since she had been admitted into Eichen it wasn’t a scream signaling his imminent death . It was one that would put fireworks and hurricanes to shame; one that would explicitly state her feelings for the spastic boy that somehow found a way to seek permanent refuge in her heart without either of them realizing it.

Instead, she only held him tighter; harder.

“Well, come on then,” he spoke into the front of her neck as he fished her hands and ankles out of the leather bounds. “Let’s change that and get you out of this shithole.”

As he moved back, he found her smiling the strongest of smiles she could muster at him, tracing the constellation of moles on the side of his face and looking at him like the sun came out beaming out on an orange and blue horizon. Although he could never live with himself being the cause of her pain, his guilt subsided a bit once he realized the first genuine, trademark smile she gave post-Eichen was to him. Knowing that, Stiles knew his world with Lydia Martin would never be how it platonically was before.

That he would proudly claim to be the cause of.

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally posted on stydia-fanfiction.tumblr.com under the same title)  
> So I'm sorry about having my only two Stydia fics be Stiles-centric thus far, and having him almost kill someone for Lydia, but I really was interested in writing about Stiles psyche and how dark it has become. But since I need to get through the hiatus somehow, I promise that I'll write more Stydia fics where Lydia is the rightful badass she is (no promises on less angst though!)
> 
> As always, if you like it please leave kudos and/or comments! Find me on Tumblr @stilesprefers-screamers and Twitter @loveroflight24 for fic updates, everything Stydia/TW related and hella more!


End file.
